December 29, 2004
Beyond the sea
I wish I had an empathy toggle.
I'd like to shut off some of the overwhelming sadness that I'm feeling over the worsening news from Southeast Asia. I isolated myself yesterday evening from the news, but I can't keep doing that. What clear is that this is a major event of our time: a modern Vesuvius or Krakatoa. For me, there's a strong feeling of empathic horror that I can feel even without live coverage. Forget the videos and eyewitness accounts - comprehending the sudden rising water is a primal fear. I lived on the coast for a couple years - one block from the Pacific Ocean in a hundred-year-old beach cottage that would be driftwood if the tide ever rises and swallows Santa Cruz.
I've always felt feelings strongly, both my own, and often those of others. I'm not saying I'm psychic or anything like that, but as my manager at eBay put it, "my attenna are really sensitive." And for me, the grip of tension on the planet is palpable and undeniable. Silicon Valley is full of Asians, both immigrants and temporary residents. There are people here that have lost entire families at home.
I spent the day and night on Sunday - the day of the tsunami - with an American who'd just moved back home from six years in Thailand to start a career at Stanford. When we woke up Monday morning, his cellphone was packed full of messages we'd missed. Neither of us knew the extent of things at the time, and it's weird to think that when he come by, we shook our heads in disbelief at the 10,000 death toll. Now it's over 85,000, it will top 100,000. They're expecting whatever toll taken by the quake and wave to double from the inevitable disease that follows diasters. There are remote regions and islands that have yet to be reconnoitered; areas where hundreds of thousands of people are simply unaccounted for. No word in or out. When this is finally looked back on in history, we'll be talking in millions.
Along with the sadness is a growing sense of disbelief and disgust at the attitude some of my countrymen are taking. I don't suffer fools well, and this event is really testing my ability to handle communicating with people at all. Even yesterday, when the death toll was at a staggering 50,000, some of my more ignorant and callous fellow Americans dropped cavalier chestnuts like, "well it's their fault for living on the water anyway" and "when you see a huge wall of water coming at you, you don't stop and stare at it, you run" and the un-fucking-believable "well, Indonesia was harboring Al-Quaeda, right? Maybe it was payback time."
Coping with disaster by tuning it out is one thing, but willfull ignorance and self-important dismissiveness are inexcusable. I don't think many Americans really understand disaster on a scale as massive as this. They're like wealthy Europeans in the 30's that dismissed the stories of Hitler's repressive tactics and brazen intent with a willfull gilded ignorance and an entrenched believe that things like that just don't happen these days. And for some fat American to suggest that his "loving" God would wipe out an entire region of the world the day after Christmas because it was fucking payback time is the kind of sick, isolated, uniquely American white hubris that leads men like Jerry Fallwell to blame 9/11 on gays and liberals. These are the same men that laud man's special status in God's "creation," lord and master of all the animals. Well, the reports from Asia are indicating that relatively few animals died in the tsunami - they'd felt the earthquake and instinctively got to high ground leaving God's precious humans to wash away.
Beware those that try to explain away the event as a whim of God. Underneath their blithe dismissal is a tacit implication is that God wouldn't let it happen here (and if it did, it'll probably be the West Coast). These are the same fuckheads that call evey California earthquake God's retribution for the ills of Hollywood, or refer to AIDS as God's plague to gay men. If you come upon such people, don't overreact. Explain to them that you disagree with their position and why, and then proceed to beat them until they piss themselves .
I'm reminded of this scene in an episode of Star Trek where in the opening scene Spock has a seizure and explains he just felt the death of shipful of Vulcans killed by some creature in space...
Okay, I just now found a transcript of the episode, called The Immunity Syndrome, and the dialog seems more eerily apt on the page than it did it memory:
It's so much easier to explain away something like terrorism. But when the ocean itself rises and wipes away entire civilizations, what then? Go on TV and call on the planet to end its 'cowardly acts of terrifying nature?' Do we invent stories of angry gods and retributions like the ancient Biblical scribes and cloister ourselves in laissez-faire rectitude? Do we use it as a pretext to attack Mars?
Americans are really fond of saying that the world changed on September 11, 2001. That's bullshit. America was simply slapped awake and brought into a deeply complicated world that had been around for a long time. Well, on December 26, 2004 - when the earth cracked with the force of 9,000 atomic bombs and the ocean swallowed everyone - rich, poor, famous, destitute, brown, white, Indonesian, and American - with the dispassionate equality with which it regards everything living on - the world really did change. I mean the planet.
When the diseases begin, and spread, and mutate - when things we can't even predict come to pass - I don't want to be the one who closed my eyes, and I don't want my country to abandon its role as a humanitarian leader because we're too busy being warmakers. Would the ultraconvative Christians that call for the abolition of the United Nations spring into action - as the UN has - to send aid, coordinate humanitarian services, or would they just babble on about the End of Days and ask everyone to pray that Jesus show mercy on the drowned Muslims?
When all our petty political battles are forgotten, the ocean will still decide who lives and dies on this planet. Understanding and protecting the environment, and knowing the varied strata and cultures of coastal societies is essential for our lives and well-beings in the future. The humanitarians: the pro bono doctors, environmentalists, and scientists - these people are doing the real "God's work" in this world. The neocons that laud the Lord while abandoning environmental treaties and legistations are the worst kind of Pharassee. They say they respect their landlord but trash the apartment, because they feel that when rent comes due, they'll be, oh, singing hymns with apostles, swaying with angels, or something equally delusional. Don't be fooled by their masturbatory fantasies of God as crusading capitalist. "Democracy" on a filthy, environmentally unsound planet is not freedom. Sometimes altruism is far-sighted selfishness.
I'd like to shut off some of the overwhelming sadness that I'm feeling over the worsening news from Southeast Asia. I isolated myself yesterday evening from the news, but I can't keep doing that. What clear is that this is a major event of our time: a modern Vesuvius or Krakatoa. For me, there's a strong feeling of empathic horror that I can feel even without live coverage. Forget the videos and eyewitness accounts - comprehending the sudden rising water is a primal fear. I lived on the coast for a couple years - one block from the Pacific Ocean in a hundred-year-old beach cottage that would be driftwood if the tide ever rises and swallows Santa Cruz.
I've always felt feelings strongly, both my own, and often those of others. I'm not saying I'm psychic or anything like that, but as my manager at eBay put it, "my attenna are really sensitive." And for me, the grip of tension on the planet is palpable and undeniable. Silicon Valley is full of Asians, both immigrants and temporary residents. There are people here that have lost entire families at home.
I spent the day and night on Sunday - the day of the tsunami - with an American who'd just moved back home from six years in Thailand to start a career at Stanford. When we woke up Monday morning, his cellphone was packed full of messages we'd missed. Neither of us knew the extent of things at the time, and it's weird to think that when he come by, we shook our heads in disbelief at the 10,000 death toll. Now it's over 85,000, it will top 100,000. They're expecting whatever toll taken by the quake and wave to double from the inevitable disease that follows diasters. There are remote regions and islands that have yet to be reconnoitered; areas where hundreds of thousands of people are simply unaccounted for. No word in or out. When this is finally looked back on in history, we'll be talking in millions.
Along with the sadness is a growing sense of disbelief and disgust at the attitude some of my countrymen are taking. I don't suffer fools well, and this event is really testing my ability to handle communicating with people at all. Even yesterday, when the death toll was at a staggering 50,000, some of my more ignorant and callous fellow Americans dropped cavalier chestnuts like, "well it's their fault for living on the water anyway" and "when you see a huge wall of water coming at you, you don't stop and stare at it, you run" and the un-fucking-believable "well, Indonesia was harboring Al-Quaeda, right? Maybe it was payback time."
Coping with disaster by tuning it out is one thing, but willfull ignorance and self-important dismissiveness are inexcusable. I don't think many Americans really understand disaster on a scale as massive as this. They're like wealthy Europeans in the 30's that dismissed the stories of Hitler's repressive tactics and brazen intent with a willfull gilded ignorance and an entrenched believe that things like that just don't happen these days. And for some fat American to suggest that his "loving" God would wipe out an entire region of the world the day after Christmas because it was fucking payback time is the kind of sick, isolated, uniquely American white hubris that leads men like Jerry Fallwell to blame 9/11 on gays and liberals. These are the same men that laud man's special status in God's "creation," lord and master of all the animals. Well, the reports from Asia are indicating that relatively few animals died in the tsunami - they'd felt the earthquake and instinctively got to high ground leaving God's precious humans to wash away.
Beware those that try to explain away the event as a whim of God. Underneath their blithe dismissal is a tacit implication is that God wouldn't let it happen here (and if it did, it'll probably be the West Coast). These are the same fuckheads that call evey California earthquake God's retribution for the ills of Hollywood, or refer to AIDS as God's plague to gay men. If you come upon such people, don't overreact. Explain to them that you disagree with their position and why, and then proceed to beat them until they piss themselves .
I'm reminded of this scene in an episode of Star Trek where in the opening scene Spock has a seizure and explains he just felt the death of shipful of Vulcans killed by some creature in space...
Okay, I just now found a transcript of the episode, called The Immunity Syndrome, and the dialog seems more eerily apt on the page than it did it memory:
DR. MCCOY: Spock, how can you be so sure the lntrepid [a starship with an all-Vulcan crew] was destroyed?There's so much news coming in, so many facts and figures, that analysis at this point is mostly conjecture, educated or otherwise. But consider this: the earthquake that caused the tsunami was strong enough cause the Earth to wobble on its axis. The "leaked energy" from the quake caused the water to rise - just a little - along the coastlines of the Pacific. We will be feeling the repercussions of this event - aftershocks natural, political, social, psychological, fiscal, and cultural - for the rest of our lives. Entire lives and careers will be devoted to the various aftermaths related to this one event on this one day.
SPOCK: I sensed it die.
MCCOY: I thought you had to be in physical contact before --
SPOCK: Doctor, even I, a half-Vulcan, could hear the death scream of 400 Vulcan minds crying out over the distance between us.
MCCOY: Not even a Vulcan could feel a starship die.
SPOCK: Call it a deep understanding of the way things happen to Vulcans, but I know not a person, not even the computers on board the Intrepid, knew what was killing them or would have understood it had they known.
MCCOY: But 400 Vulcans...
SPOCK: I've noticed that about your people. You find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. You speak about the objective hardness ofthe Vulcan heart, yet how little room there seems to be... in yours.
MCCOY: Suffer the death of thy neighbor, eh, Spock? You wouldn't wish that on us, would you?
SPOCK: It might have rendered your history a bit less bloody.
It's so much easier to explain away something like terrorism. But when the ocean itself rises and wipes away entire civilizations, what then? Go on TV and call on the planet to end its 'cowardly acts of terrifying nature?' Do we invent stories of angry gods and retributions like the ancient Biblical scribes and cloister ourselves in laissez-faire rectitude? Do we use it as a pretext to attack Mars?
Americans are really fond of saying that the world changed on September 11, 2001. That's bullshit. America was simply slapped awake and brought into a deeply complicated world that had been around for a long time. Well, on December 26, 2004 - when the earth cracked with the force of 9,000 atomic bombs and the ocean swallowed everyone - rich, poor, famous, destitute, brown, white, Indonesian, and American - with the dispassionate equality with which it regards everything living on - the world really did change. I mean the planet.
When the diseases begin, and spread, and mutate - when things we can't even predict come to pass - I don't want to be the one who closed my eyes, and I don't want my country to abandon its role as a humanitarian leader because we're too busy being warmakers. Would the ultraconvative Christians that call for the abolition of the United Nations spring into action - as the UN has - to send aid, coordinate humanitarian services, or would they just babble on about the End of Days and ask everyone to pray that Jesus show mercy on the drowned Muslims?
When all our petty political battles are forgotten, the ocean will still decide who lives and dies on this planet. Understanding and protecting the environment, and knowing the varied strata and cultures of coastal societies is essential for our lives and well-beings in the future. The humanitarians: the pro bono doctors, environmentalists, and scientists - these people are doing the real "God's work" in this world. The neocons that laud the Lord while abandoning environmental treaties and legistations are the worst kind of Pharassee. They say they respect their landlord but trash the apartment, because they feel that when rent comes due, they'll be, oh, singing hymns with apostles, swaying with angels, or something equally delusional. Don't be fooled by their masturbatory fantasies of God as crusading capitalist. "Democracy" on a filthy, environmentally unsound planet is not freedom. Sometimes altruism is far-sighted selfishness.
